The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects

This paper argues existing scholarship on Asian American communities is limited by an assumption that incorporation into the US can productively address racial and economic precarity. As an alternative, we offer “Extinguishing Asian (American) Insurgency”, a theoretical framework that incorporates histories of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics of incorporation into contemporary sociological analyses of Asian subject formation. Applying Du Boisian sociology alongside Frantz Fanon and Joy James, the framework adopts a global, relational analysis of Asian Americans and the US state. We demonstrate the framework's utility through two case studies: anti-colonial Sikh diasporic politics through the Gadar Party and US state efforts to tie diasporic South Vietnamese identity to an anti-communist politic. As such, we encourage the study of alternative possibilities of Asian subject formation that are extinguished by state incorporation, particularly through imperialism and military serivce. Specifically, we address sociologists who extinguish the insurgent Asian American subject in their scholarship by assuming incorporation and pro-state politics as a natural end goal of migration, or those who simply do not name the US as the institutional force extinguishing possibilities of Asian Americans' insurgency.     

Advocacy by Proxy: The Children's Lobby in American Politics

This essay considers the organizational and political activity of the children's lobby in the United States with reference to four issues: how advocacy groups emerge and are sustained, how various groups are legitimated, how advocates participate in constructing a children's agenda, and how advocates respond to changes in this agenda. The essay argues that this group sector has mobilized and become stagnant in response to various structures of opportunity. Second, it suggests that children's representation evolves over time, with various facets of the issue gaining currency in turn. Attuned to these changes, advocates shift their collective focus to emerging concerns, or fail to remain viable. Third, public interest groups scramble to differentiate their programmatic foci, sources of revenue, ana services offered to members. Fourth, the essay considers how their ability to navigate these organizational concerns determines the ability of children's advocates, and of public interest groups more generally, to provide representation for otherwise marginalized groups in American politics.     

Transcending Nations

While the literature on 'transnational advocacy networks' is beginning to unfold in different world regions, little attention has been given to cross-border organizing strategies that occur within borderlands as regions.In these spaces,networks can flourish through kinship, personal friendships, organizational coalitions, and official bodies. This article argues that cross-border organizing is a variant of 'local politics,' but that it presents far great obstacles than either transnational strategies or typical local politics due to multiple political institutions and ensuing complexity and accountability problems. At the US-Mexico border, other challenges emerge given economic poverty, limited civic capacity, and bi-national inequalities. This article provides a conceptual framework to compare cross-border organizing experiences with and without an institutional shroud that legitimizes activists'claims,exercises authority, and distributes resources.     

Women in Politics in Post-Transitional Democracies: the chilean case

This article looks at women's participation in formal political institutions in posttransition politics. Employing the case of post-dictatorship Chile, it outlines the barriers to women's participation in the formal political arena; discusses the various strategies that Chilean women are currently employing to overcome their exclusion; and finally, examines the challenges that political women confront in promoting 'women's interests' in political institutions. Throughout the article two main arguments are advanced. First, where women's movements do not demand institutional reforms during the transition period - a time when movements enjoy influence and parties are in flux - then the barriers to women in political institutions re-emerge. In Chile, the fact that women did not demand institutional reforms, such as quotas for women in decision-making positions, is linked tothe broader strategy of the movement tomake citizenship demands based on women's 'difference'. This strategy inhibited women from demanding power (i.e. access to institutions as individuals) because this conformed to a masculine-defined notion of politics inconsistent with women's 'different' style of practising politics. A second,related argument is that a strategy based on women's 'difference' hinders women in politics frompromoting feminist goals,especially in the climate ofsocial conservatism that characterizes post-transition Chilean politics. Despite these constraints and the many challenges Chilean women in politics confront, gains are being made, as women recognize the need for, and begin to demand, institutional reforms to expand their presence in formal politics.     

Media advocates,Latino citizens and niche cable The limits of ‘no limits’ TV

In Shot in America, Chon Noriega calls for the study of media activism’s work ‘within the system’ of state institutions and for analysis of the relationships between media activism, the television industry and government policies. This article uses a cultural policy studies focus to answer this call and map the deregulated terrain upon which media advocacy groups must now operate. Liberal governance demands that media advocates find means other than state-directed appeals to advance their agendas. As such, this essay examines the efforts of several Latino advocacy groups to garner viewer support for a Latino-themed cable television show, Resurrection Boulevard, and to use the series as a vehicle for increased Latino participation in the television industry. This article focuses on the issue of access for Latinos to professional positions that affect television programming, and it presents tools for advocacy efforts within political spheres to achieve more socially equitable access to media technologies. First, the paper traces the regulatory history of the broadcasting and cable television industries to show how the federal government narrowly conceives of ‘the public interest’ as a specifically consumerist one. The article then analyses the structures that led to cable television’s ‘narrowcasting’ format, such as Showtime’s ‘No Limits’ programming, and argues that liberalism has created a context wherein several media advocates normalise the ‘citizen-consumer’ model. Having established this groundwork, the author then conducts a case study of the economic and social forces that shape Resurrection Boulevard, which is written, produced and acted by Latinos. Through this study, the author maintains that advocacy groups’ consumer-based appeals to Latinos as ‘citizen-consumers’ fail to serve as effective instruments for achieving increased minority representation in the television industry.     

Developments in gender and U.S. politics: A call for intersectionality

Since “women and politics” scholarship emerged in the 1970s, social, institutional, and theoretical developments have shaped the trajectory of U.S. scholarship in this field. First, the presence of women in formal politics has increased, albeit unevenly across parties and minority groups over time. Simultaneously, the capacity to study “political women” has become supported through institutional mechanisms such as academic journals and communities of practice. Moreover, gender as a critical focus of analysis has been developed and refined. In the literature on women and politics, the shift from studying sex differences to interrogating gendered political institutions is especially salient. This institutional focus, along with recent intersectional studies of gender and politics, increases opportunities for cross‐pollination of sociological and political science perspectives. In this review, I provide a brief history of the U.S. scholarship on gender and politics and map these relevant social, institutional, and theoretical advances. I highlight the value of recent intersectional contributions in this field and make the case for bringing partisanship—an increasingly salient political identity and structure—into intersectional approaches to gender and politics.     

Social Justice in Career Services: Perspectives of University Career Center Directors

Research indicates that career development practitioners value social justice and desire additional skills to be able to advocate effectively. Many of these practitioners work on college campuses under the supervision of career center directors; however, directors' perspectives on social justice have been missing from the literature. Following the National Career Development Association's mandate to actively practice the professional value of honoring diversity and promoting social justice, we surveyed 11 career center directors regarding advocacy in career services. Results of thematic analysis yielded center directors' insights into both defining and promoting social justice. Participants addressed the roles and responsibilities of career counselors, career center directors, and institutional culture. Implications for practice include the importance of open communication and the need for collaboration inside and outside of the career center. These findings highlight potential areas for future research into best practices for integrating social justice and advocacy in university career services.     

Channeling advocacy? Assessing how funding source shapes the strategies of environmental organizations

ABSTRACT

All non–governmental organizations (NGOs) rely on funding to support their work. But how does the source of funding shape the types of advocacy groups engage in? Using novel panel data collected by the Environmental Funders Network, this research examines how funding from government, foundations, business, and members shape the advocacy work of environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in the UK. Past research suggests that elite funding sources channel groups into institutional advocacy, such as lobbying or litigation, and away from public advocacy, such as protesting. This paper confirms previous research while also showing that all types of funding channel group actions. Foundation and business funding is associated with more institutional advocacy, government funding is associated with non–political advocacy such as species conservation, and member funding is associated with public advocacy. By comparing across funding types, this study demonstrates the ways in which groups are both helped and hindered by funding from different sources.     

Book reviews

The US campaign for ‘pure food’ from the 1880s through 1906 featured a diverse coalition of groups with quite different ways of defining the problem, identifying the relevant actors, and balancing political and consumerist tactics. This paper examines how these differences in framing, rather than undermining cooperation or impeding success, helped to broaden the coalition for pure food and to win passage of the 1906 Food and Drug Act. It pays particular attention to the ways in which women's groups acted as frame brokers, translating pure food issues into a maternalist language and, in so doing, contributing both new support and new tactics to the campaign. The case study is used to address more general issues in the relationship between framing and (1) coalition-building and (2) tactical repertoires.     

‘Being in the Spaces where Decisions are Made’: Reproductive Rights Advocacy and Policy Influence in Two Regions of Peru

In the 1990s, some segments of Latin American feminist movements shifted to advocacy strategies to influence government policies. Long-standing social movement theories predict that this tactical change to institutional means has two possible consequences for a movement: either it gains greater influence over policy arenas and becomes more effective in achieving outcomes, or it loses capacity to carry out protest tactics and becomes less effective in achieving outcomes. However, empirical studies on Latin American feminist organizations intervening in policies, and recent social movement theorizing, indicate that the relationship between social movements and policy influence is more complex. Moreover, these theories have been formulated based on empirical studies in contexts with established democratic frameworks and institutions. The study presented here employed Grounded Theory to examine inductively the research questions of how reproductive rights organizations carry out advocacy to influence government policies in Peru. Data was collected through participant observation and focus group discussions among two reproductive rights coalitions in the regions of Arequipa and Cusco. The findings indicate that the reproductive rights coalitions develop a multiplicity of interactions with government officials, as a means to influence policies through various channels and handle constraints on their ability to act as independent pressure groups. In addition, the findings show that the coalitions deal with a wide range of factors to influence policies: organizational capacity, advocacy strategies, issue frames, relationships with other policy actors as well as political and social aspects that facilitate or hinder advocacy. The study concludes that the relationship between social movements and policy influence is more complex than portrayed by long-standing theories. Instead, the findings are consistent with, and enhance the scholarship on Latin American feminist organizations involved in policies, as well as recent social movement theorizing that takes into account how various factors affect social movement influence on policies.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

Shifting sands that threaten policy advocacy for vulnerable children and youth: A case study

Recent changes in the institutional and political environment, including the rise of a neoliberal logic that favors private solutions to social problems and increasing political partisanship, have created new challenges for statewide legislative advocacy. Yet, there is a lacuna in the study of the sector’s response to new and contradictory environmental pressures. Using the lens of institutional and resource dependence theories on organizations, this qualitative case study targets this gap by examining how a nonprofit statewide legislative advocacy organization for vulnerable children has responded to shifting political and institutional conditions that have transpired since its founding in the early 1990s. It examines 1) how the organization has made sense of these emerging challenges and demands, 2) how these shifts have reshaped its advocacy practices, and 3) how they have influenced the viability of the organization. Adaptive responses of the organization included a shift in emphasis from direct legislative advocacy to advocacy directed at the implementation of policy and grassroots advocacy. Implications for the future of statewide legislative advocacy for vulnerable children are discussed.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system 1

This paper proposes a shift in legal advocacy approaches employed by activists in the US battered women's movement that would take into account how the work of criminal justice professionals (police officers, probation officers, judges, and prosecutors) is organized. While judicial procedures may be more successful in bringing domestic abusers to justice than in the past, they are less successful in producing safety for the victims of abusers. Using institution ethnography as a research strategy, I explore aspects of how the work of practitioners in the police and court system is organized in ways that are not observable to activists working with the victims of abuse. An important aspect of the institutional process are its texts. Texts, as they are produced and processed in people's work settings, coordinate and regulate the different phases of practitioners’ work. In these work processes, organized and limited by formalized texts, women's experience of violence and intimidation is erased and issues of their safety disappear. In conclusion, I propose a method of engaging criminal justice professionals and community advocates in an investigation of local criminal justice settings with the intent of making changes in practices which fail to attend to the safety needs of women who are battered.     

How organizational characteristics affect the adaptive tactics used by human service nonprofit managers confronting financial uncertainty

The way that nonprofits respond to funding uncertainty is crucial to their ability to meet goals and position themselves for future success. This article investigates how structural, managerial, and financial characteristics affect the adaptive tactics used by human service nonprofits during times of financial stress. These tactics include adding new programs, reducing programs or staff, expanding or starting joint programs, pursuing earned income, and expanding advocacy involvement. Using longitudinal data on human service nonprofits collected on either side of the 2002–2003 economic downtown, we find that larger size provides organizations with a unique ability to choose among different adaptive tactics, as larger size was significantly predictive of adding new programs, reducing programs, expanding advocacy, and pursuing earned income. Strategic planning was positively associated with innovative tactics such as starting joint programs or pursuing earned income. Financial stress or declines in an organization's major funding source led to cutbacks, as expected, but managers who foresaw these challenges were able to respond proactively by adding programs or starting joint programs. However, managers with more training did not respond much differently than did other managers, and organizational age and use of performance management tools had no effect in guiding organizational responses to financial uncertainty.     

Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime,sex, and rights

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.     

Wars and Invisible Girls,Shadow Industries,and the Politics of Not-Knowing

This article begins in the interior of Mozambique during the country's post-independence war with the stories of three girls variously affected by violence. It then follows girls' war experiences in general out from the frontlines to wider international locales where girls face domestic violence in their home communities and civil and labor violence at the hands of (shadow) transnational profiteers; who reap billions of dollars yearly on children's factory, domestic, and sexual labor. The article is set in an overall theoretical framework that explores how a politics of invisibility - literally of 'not-knowing' - has developed in which little public information is available on children's human rights violations or on the political tactics and economic gain that have attended to these violations.     

The Hidden Hitler and the Hidden Reader: Review of The Hidden Hitler by Lother Machtan

Machtan proposes that Hitler, before entering politics, was a practicing homosexual during his early adulthood. Later it became necessary for him to destroy evidence of this stage of his career. The difficulties of satisfactorily substantiating such a claim are discussed, with special reference to 19th-century gay figures. Machtan's book is criticized for not providing adequate analysis of social and institutional forces, as well as his assumption that such personal uncovering is intrinsically informative. Some speculations regarding the recurrent interest in the homosexuality of famous men is offered.     

Romancing the nation: Family melodrama and the sentimental logics of bourgeois nationalism

Abstract

In the years since the 1970s, something of a revolution has occurred in the area of South Asian American fiction, as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani, Anita Rau Badami and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have begun publishing their work. Bharati Mukherjee's predominant focus is the politics of immigration, not only as a prevalent preoccupation in her fictional writing, but as the focus of a series of newspaper and journal articles as well. This article seeks to contextualize the development of Mukherjee's writing in relation to wider current debates about the nature of the American canon, the question of 'Americanness', and the continually vexed issue of multicultural politics in the US. In reading four of Mukherjee's novels both through and against her polemical writing, I will argue that Mukherjee's fictions should be read together as an ongoing counter-nativist project and, as such, constitute an important intervention in US race relations.